Mending the Human Motor 37cooperative trade union’s rest home planned in 1936 to serve 1,300 adults and
140 children, but in the end only 32 children joined their parents at the home:
the rest stayed in the city at kindergartens and day care centers.^70 Very few
adult workers at Moscow’s Trekhgornaia manufacturing plant received pute-
vki to southern resorts in the 1930s, judging by reports in the factory newspa-
per, but 88 of their children spent three summer months at Gelendzhik, on the
Caucasus Black Sea shore, repairing their health in places “where once only
bourgeois sons and daughters could rest.” The send-off, letters home, and re-
turn of these children were the highlights of the summer season.^71
Some married vacationers preferred to travel alone for their medical treat-
ment so that they could not only rest well but also enjoy a temporary change
of sexual partners. At the height of the Great Terror in 1937, university stu-
dent Mary Leder escaped the tense political climate with a six-week putevka
to the Red Army sanatorium in Crimea. “The atmosphere was calculatedly
fl irtatious. Territories were staked out, with each new arrival appraised and
evaluated. My two roommates, young married women, were perfectly open
about looking for men to pair off with.” Mary’s unmarried status was deemed
too complicated for a casual affair: she might expect romance to lead to a wed-
ding. A married offi cer who had taken a fancy to her quickly sought a safer
liaison as soon as he learned that Mary was single. Among workers too, the
summer fl ing was a familiar feature of rest homes and sanatoria, judging by a
series of feuilletons in the printing workers’ union journal. In one story, a wife
quizzed her middle-aged husband on his return from Crimea: “They say that
married men behave like bachelors, and all run after women.” The husband
admitted that his roommate had engaged in “immoral behavior,” but he de-
clared that he himself had remained chaste and only sat up talking with one
“Marusia” until 11:00 p.m. In the 1936 Mikhail Verner fi lm A Girl Hurries to
a Rendezvous , a henpecked industrial manager on a solo vacation relishes the
attentions of pretty young women in a Caucasus Mineral Waters resort. But
before he can consummate an affair, his suspicious wife turns up to haul him
back home. Complaints about corruption in the trade union included accusa-
tions that young women, often of the wrong social class, received putevki to
the union rest home ahead of more senior and deserving men.^72 Vacationing
male offi cials wished to spend their time with attractive female companions.
Did Soviet medical vacationers prefer this occasional opportunity for
a change of sexual scene, or were such casual fl irtations an unintended
- GARF, f. 9493, op. 3, d. 1478 (annual reports on rest homes, 1935–1946), ll. 58–59.
- Znamia trekhgorki , 9 May 1936 (quote); 7 June 1936; 17 August 1936; 4 June 1938; 11
July 1938; 18 July 1938; 1 August 1938; Martenovka , 6 July 1940. - “The atmosphere was,” Mary Leder, My Life in Stalinist Russia (Bloomington, IN,
2001), 132; “They say that married men,” Moskovskii pechatnik, no. 22 (June 1926): 9, 5;
Pechatnik , 13 July 1929, 11; Devushka speshit na svidaniia , dir. Mikhail Verner (Belgoskino,
1936); Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Sankt Peterburga (TsGA SPb), f. 4804, op. 10, ed.
khr. 4, ll. 449–50 (printers’ union congress); Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv istoriko-
politicheskikh dokumentov Sankt Peterburga, f. 435, op. 1, d. 59, l. 205ob. (correspondence
of party cell, 1925).